Hey, thanks for taking my call. I'm a former Navy pilot, and I need to tell you about something that happened back in 2015. I've kept quiet about this for years, but now that some of this has gone public, I figure it's time to share my side of it. So, this was during a training exercise off the East Coast. January 2015. Cold as hell out there, but clear skies, perfect visibility. I was flying an F/A-18 Super Hornet, part of a routine training mission with my squadron. We'd been doing these exercises for weeks, same airspace, same procedures. Nothing unusual. Just another day. That morning, I'd grabbed coffee with my wingman before the briefing. We were joking about how boring these training runs were getting. I remember that. Funny how you remember the little things.
We're up at around 25,000 feet, running through our exercises, when our radar systems start picking up something. At first, we thought it was a glitch. The object wasn't behaving like anything we'd seen before. It wasn't showing up the way aircraft normally do. So we get vectored toward it to investigate. Standard procedure when you've got an unknown contact in restricted airspace. As we're closing in, I'm watching it on my displays, and I'm thinking, okay, maybe it's a drone. Maybe it's some kind of weather balloon that drifted into the area. You try to rationalize it, you know? But then we get visual on it through the targeting pod. And that's when everything I thought I knew just went out the window. This thing was flying against a 120-knot wind, and it wasn't moving. Just hovering there. No wings. No exhaust. No rotor wash. Nothing.
I'm locked onto it with our infrared targeting system, and I can see it clear as day on my screen. It's oblong, like a Tic Tac or a pill shape, but it's got this... I don't even know how to describe it. It looked almost white-hot on the infrared, but the shape was solid. Defined edges. And then it starts rotating. Just spinning on its axis, and here's the thing, when it rotates, it doesn't change speed. It doesn't dip or wobble. It just smoothly rotates while maintaining its position against that wind. I'm watching this in real-time, and my wingman is seeing it too. We're both on comms, and he's saying the same thing I'm thinking. What the hell are we looking at? The whole encounter probably lasted about a minute before we had to break off. But I watched that object do things that shouldn't be possible. No visible means of propulsion. No heat signature where engines should be. Just this thing, hovering and rotating in mid-air like it was defying physics.
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